CCG Year of Engagement Podcast #1: Remembering Black Dallas

“Sometimes people don’t know where to get started. So I would say the place to get started is at the beginning. So just start with what you have.” – Tameshia Rudd-Ridge

The Community Collections Grants from the American Folklife Center support contemporary cultural field research within diverse communities. Through this grant program, the Center offered fellowships to individuals and organizations to work within their communities to produce ethnographic cultural documentation, such as oral history interviews and audio-visual recordings of cultural activity, from the community perspective. Since 2022, the Center has awarded twenty-nine of these grants. As we move into 2025, many of these grantees are working with AFC staff liaisons and archivists to prepare these collections for going public as digital collections on the Library’s website. This year will also see a number of public programs showcasing these grantees, their communities, and their finished collections, for a celebration we are calling the CCG Year of Engagement.

This week, as part of the CCG Year of Engagement, we are launching a new subseries of the Folklife Today podcast, focused on interviews with the project teams behind these wonderful community documentation projects. In this first episode, we interview Tameshia Rudd-Ridge and Jourdan Brunson, the project team that led the documentation for the If Tenth Street Could Talk: Remembering Black Dallas CCG project.

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Jourdan shared early in the interview that, prior to the start of their project, he and Tameshia learned they were cousins through the help of kinkofa, a digital family history platform designed to help black communities uncover, document, and preserve their family stories. The discovery of this family connection led Tameshia to dig even further into the history of the area. During a day-long search for an ancestor’s address in April 2021, she was saddened to learn that the house had been demolished to make way for a highway. Knowing there was a good chance that even more of the historic district was at risk to suffer the same fate, Tameshia and Jourdan set about developing a plan to document the history. This eventually led to the team learning about the Center’s CCG program.

“Someone had sent us the Community Collections Grant, like, ‘hey, I know what y’all are trying to do. We just, you know, this grant came across, we think it’ll be great for it,” Tameshia recalled.

The team had a lot of work ahead of them, but they knew that the community had an important story to tell, as Jourdan explained:

“One of the things that’s unique about this community is that this is a place with structures that have existed over generations, that descendants live in the community and have been there for generations, and care deeply about maintaining the fabric of the community and welcoming people in to learn about its history. And there are Freedom Colonies across the State of Texas that have their name, that have descendants, that my have some structures. But like Meshia said, there’s a uniqueness about Tenth Street in that it is so intact and that there are so many stories to tie to a place or to a person that we can see. And so that was intriguing to me as someone who is from descendant communities that no longer physically exist. Really, in the scope of this project, we wanted to put together as many of these disparate pieces, the stories that a descendant may have, the archives that might be newspaper clippings about the vibrant nightlife in the 1930s in the community, and naming those structures, be able to say where they are, and place them on a map.”

Meshia pointed out that Tenth Street is one of the few Black heritage sites that have been named to the National Historic Register. The If Tenth Street Could Talk CCG project not only preserves the history of the most intact Freemen’s Town in the United States — it also documents the descendant-led and resident-led preservation efforts, highlighting the stories of the people and providing the context of why the community matters.

When asked if they had any advice for others looking to start similar community documentation projects, Jourdan had this to say:

“I think, if we hadn’t gotten the funding for CCG, the advice that I would tell us then was to go forward anyway. Don’t wait for the funding, because so much can be lost in that time of waiting, or not receiving funding. And the stories are precious, literally. They can disappear at any time. So don’t let that stop you.”

Meshia pointed out ways to leverage resources that may already be available in the area, such as borrowing equipment from local libraries and determining whether there are unprocessed collections at local libraries and archives which might benefit from community members identifying people in photographs. “I think there’s just ways to really activate locally, and to just help even local institutions be better stewards of the history that you have,” she said.

For more about the If Tenth Street Could Talk Community Collections Grant project, visit the Folklife Today podcast page for the full episode.

[Note: The intro/outro music for this episode comes from another CCG project – Sonidos de Houston: Documenting the City’s Chicano Music Scene. The clip features an instrumental medley performed by Avizo during an open-air concert documented in the course of the CCG project.]

Other Resources

• Check out this post about If Tenth Street Could Talk from the Library’s Of the People blog
• Visit the Remembering Black Dallas website to learn about upcoming events, services, and news about the next steps of the project
• Learn about the ways the Remembering Black Dallas team utilized kinkofa, a digital family history platform intentionally designed to reconnect Black families
• Read more about the ways the team used GIS mapping to help document the Tenth Street neighborhood